Would I recognise the garden if I saw it - Rebecca Hawkes

why would you come here with me willingly whenthis is exactly how horror movies startpanting up a sunless path somewhere deciduous where the trees are darker than the night sky and not for surplus of stars – the reek ofrotting fly agaric and sentimental earth – maybe you’re into it or maybe you’re just being polite precarious on your edge of the wooden raft which is parked in the clearing like an altar

until we’re all out of chardonnay and ready salted chips and somehow into a fumbling of nuzzled permissions – inhaling my own rank breath from the yielding socket of your neck – wet air rancid as a shearing shedwafting ammonia and lanolin – black pearls of shit rattling down the chutes before the shorn yearlings are chucked through – I don’t know how to talk to you or if I am interesting enough to lovenow I’ve gone and got myself buried in your mouth

[engraved in it]

this bafflement of teeth and excess nerve endingsis – licking nectarine honey off a paring knife – sweetness pierces the tongue like a staplegun like a shaft of light zeroed convex to burning point through a magnifying glass heldover some unfortunate ant – wrong place wrong time and so highly combustible – I find myself wanting

wrong things – bite until I burst every capillary all over you to bruise – the smell of your skin hairs shrivelling to ash too close to a source of intense heat – I don’t know why I ache after what is most hurtful – as though I could skin everyone who is nice to me and live inside of them – is there anything I react to more violently than gentleness – it’s just – there’s a lot going on right now

this vagrant heart swinging its amnesias ahead of us now like a cellphone torch and laughing at our stumble up the slick clay incline– can we lie down – can I leave my shoes on – taste fermented honey mead or well-fed sourdough starter – a kind of rednessinflammatory and luxuriant as the indefensible pop songs of our youth – crooked fingers bucking directionless on the way to somewhere unspecified by language

and then a falling branch in the darka bodycrying out and trembling beneath mine

Pony Club Summer Camp - Rebecca Hawkes

the pony club wash up against the rockswhile you watchthe socks & jodhpurs stuffed into their helmets riverside&the pony club offer you electrolyte drink so much more blue than swimming pool you expect to half die of it quenching in your throat like an eyeful of chlorine&the pony club argue over whether any of their true loves could be stronger than the bond between a girl & her horse (a phenomenon so universally potent it is taken for granted as a unit of measurement)&the pony club braid everything with their hot freckled hands & after weaving plaits in hay & manes & dressage ribbons they sit in a circle and braid your hair together with their hair & thus you become one ponytail & so the pony club is a sunburnt rat king&the pony club weep their way through the seasonmucking in through pollen & spore & gusty choking horsehair moult all red-eyed unrepentant antihistamine addled & still yelling at you newly unsaddled to get up and quit bawling&the pony club dangle above your bunk on their reins from the rings of Saturn like a child’s mobile & they rotate slowly with your every exhaleas though you could still move them even if you can’t quite reach from here &the pony club have you scrubbing for hours polishing halfchewed grass from bridle bits but they refuse to pick the musky caked oatmeal out of their braces after breakfast

Contributor's Note

Rebecca Hawkes is a painter and perpetual student. She completed an MA in non-fiction writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters last year and has immediately reverted to lyric poetry.